Sarah Parcak Quotes

We've found that patterns of site looting have increased between 500 and 1000 percent since the start of the Arab Spring. Now this is a problem as old as human beings. People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.

Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

Much has been said and continues to be said of what little concern the Turks had for the Acropolis treasures.

The looters are using Google Earth, too. They're coming in with metal detectors and geophysical equipment. Some ask me to confirm sites.

The British Museum is great for seeing how excellent we were at stealing things.

We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren't there enough of those in the world?

Some people have criticized the United States and the United States military for guarding oil fields and not guarding the Iraqi National Museum which had priceless antiquities in it. They say that this shows a fundamental lack of respect for Iraqi history. I want to remind those people of this: The oldest relics in the museum, 5,000 or 6,000 years old. That oil is 65 million years old. You had to guard that. ... Those antiquities will only last another 5,000 or 6,000 years. When we burn that oil, those fumes will linger long after.

They decided the mummy would be unwrapped, for the titillation of the ladies, just after dinner.

I think it's clever how Rome have kept a load of old stuff. There's no overheads, yet people are going over there to see it.

It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

When eras die, their legacies Are left to strange police. Professors in New England guard The glory that was Greece.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

We live in what virtually amounts to a museum - which does not happen to a lot of people.

One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

Libraries and museums are the DNA of our culture.

Nobody likes to see that which they've invested in disappear from the face of the earth before they've even died. This is not cool. We can now see what the landmarks, in fact are.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.

I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.